Over at Microsoft, they've just celebrated their first Open Source Day.

Wow.

I think Jamie Cannon was right when he (she?) joked that "Hell has frozen over".

I know Microsoft is full of smart, hard working people, but this is still a significant milestone for them, and one that occurred before it's too late for them to change.

All along, I've been expecting the standard response and outcome: first they ignore you, then they ridicule you, then they fight you, then you win.  It looks like we're on the right track.  However, we've all seen Microsoft's strategy of "Embrace, Extend, Extinguish" that only begins in the "then you win" phase.  That means the open source world still needs to be cautious, but Open Source will be a tougher nut to crack than office suites, browsers, and programming languages.  After all, it's pretty hard to extinguish open source, isn't it?

Well, if you were interested in embracing, extending, and extinguishing individual open source projects, there are two simple strategies:

1. Buy the owners and/or committers.  Hire them, contract them, or whatever else it takes to get their attention.  Then slowly change the roadmap over time, morph the project into something else, ignore the core user base, and gently drift into obscurity.
2. Same as above, but dedicate your own people to the project and do it from the inside out.  This will be tricky, especially once the community at large catches onto the theme.

Neither of these options is easy and it will take much skill to avoid being totally transparent, but they seem doable.  Given a large enough bank account, option 1 seems particularly appealing when applied as a surgical strike to key trouble-making projects.

So, could anybody really kill "Open Source"?  Not likely.  It does, however, seem possible that with enough determination and resources that an entity could dismantle a few handfuls of key projects that would be dramatic enough in the aggregate to undermine confidence in the "system".  But after the headlines are made and the dust settles, I think new project owners, committers, and contributors would then appear and fork the original projects under new names and "Open Source" would resume it's regularly scheduled releases.

Okay, so what does Open Source Day at Microsoft mean then?  I think it means that Microsoft has begun the Embrace process.  Extend will certainly come next, but perhaps Extinguish is off the plate this time.  I think it means we're about to see yet another explosion in the growth of Open Source, the number of enterprise-ready projects, and the diversity of platforms and languages.  We're going to have more competition among projects across the board which will force vast improvements in the areas of user interface and aesthetics (think "Extend").

It's Open Source Day everywhere.